Because restaurant menus can sometimes come with jump scares.
We were eating out the other day.
My eldest, Mika, looking through the menu. Curious. Focused. Reading aloud. Then he pauses.
“What’s this shit take mushroom?”
Time. Froze. I choked slightly on my drink.
My youngest, Maya, looked up, sensing a glitch in the matrix.
The Missus blanked. Mouth slightly open. Eyes darting around the table.
Then, without missing a beat, she snapped into recovery mode:
“Haihhh… It’s Shee-Tar-Kay Mushroom lah…”
Mika nodded. Calmly.
“Ohhh.” As if we were the ones who needed clarification.
No waiter was around. No strangers overheard… we hope.
Mika moved on. We, probably for the next ten minutes, could not.
This is the linguistic hazard of kids reading out loud. They don’t read words. They decode them. One syllable at a time.
With the confidence of a news anchor. In public. Without warning. At full volume.
And yes, technically, he wasn’t wrong.
The spelling is absolute bait. Especially for a 12-year-old boy.
The damage? Done.
Whoever decided to put “shi” and “take” next to each other in that order clearly never field-tested it with a tween who still reads everything like he’s narrating a YouTube video.
I also realised something that day. As adults, we don’t actually read menus anymore. We skim. Our brains auto-correct.
Kids don’t have that software installed yet. They read exactly what’s printed.
Which is why they’re unintentionally the funniest people at the table.
Also, I regret to report that in our household now, it is permanently known as “the take sh*t mushroom.”
I guess we’ve lost all culinary innocence.
Eating out will never be the same again.
From now on, every time I see “shiitake” on a menu, I won’t think about the dish.
I’ll think about that split second where four people at one table simultaneously wondered whether to laugh… or pretend nothing happened.
Anyway.
Another day, another vocabulary ambush.
So if you ever see a father silently mouthing every item on a restaurant menu before handing it to his kids…
he’s not deciding what to order.
He’s conducting a full phonetic risk assessment.
Because sometimes, parenting is just live improv with no script…
and occasional shi*takes.
Got your own “did-they-just-say-that” moment?
Drop it below. I need the support.
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